


She Said Fire

by HAL_berd



Category: Sdorica: Sunset (Video Game)
Genre: A series of shots, Canon Divergence, Multi, What a time in the canon storyline to revive this piece huh, so I guess it's always finished?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2020-09-06 13:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20292301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HAL_berd/pseuds/HAL_berd
Summary: A death, and the series of events it set off.





	1. The Order

She said fire.

In that moment, as Elio made away with the very face of all that she had surmounted, as he and her trophy cast a smaller and smaller image against her rapidly narrowing eyes, she made one final grasp for the sky. Her pale, marble fingers splayed to take hold of her future. She could imagine his wings ruffling with the gale of her command. She could see him in the window between her digits, could almost feel his wings beating around her skin, as her hand curled in for the signal.

That hand plucked Elio out of the air.

Elio hung, frozen in a moment of shock.

Elio dropped Theodore from boneless arms.

Elio wrapped trembling fingers around the arrow in his chest.

And Elio plummeted. 

Naya, beside her, drew and held breath. Perhaps she was horrified at how true her own shot had flown, or perhaps at the command that had willed her fingers to release.

Angelia's hand lowered, tracking the boy's path towards the ground. In that moment, she felt nothing but the icy weight of marble sinking into her stomach as her mind finally caught up with her actions.

As she waded into the wake of the murder, she was despondent.

Quietly, in terrified emulation, with barely a breeze of a breath, as if her strength had all been expelled in one command, she whispered.

She whispered, fire.


	2. The Cousin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was eighteen.

"There's no trace of Theodore, Your Majesty."

Angelia nodded absently.

By the time they'd reached Elio, the life had already bled out of the boy's blank blue eyes. His limp arm was stretched out towards a fading trail of footprints. Theodore was nowhere to be found.

Angelia could feel the marble lump threatening to rise in her throat as she stared at the boy's crumpled form, but her people were still here and she could not fracture.

"Thank you, soldier. What is your name?"

"Lieutenant Matthias Sylvain, Your Majesty."

"Thank you, Matthias," she said, scraping a smile into her face. "Go back to camp and get some well-deserved rest."

She was twenty. Elio was about her age, only two years younger. Two years ago, she'd still been under Theodore's thumb, unaware of the grueling, consuming, yet terrifyingly fulfilling purpose that would lie in wait for her. If she had died two years ago, she would have died unaware. She would have died without meeting Dagger or any of the bears, without meeting Lio and Leah, without truly understanding the extent of the suffering her kingdom spawned. Without having changed anything.

He was eighteen. 

"Angel, are you going to be alright?" Naya asked from her side, voice soft.

Angelia took in a shuddering breath.

Elio hadn't been an enemy soldier fighting under Theodore's banner. He hadn't been a spy, or an assassin, or a malicious saboteur.

He had been her cousin. 

He had been an eighteen-year-old boy hoping against all hope to meet his father for the first time. 

"I don't know," she said.

She asked Naya to order the soldiers back.

Then, with only her closest friend and fellow perpetrator of this heinous murder as witness, Queen Angelia of the Kingdom of the Sun knelt in the dirt and closed her cousin's eyes.


	3. The Spider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The time for grieving is over."

"This is slander!" Angelia said, her voice explosive in the confines of the private discussion room. "He wasn't a traitor to the throne. He had no such designs!"

Fredrica sifted through her papers.

"First of all, Your Majesty, it's libel in print. Secondly—"

It was here that Fredrica pointed a single manicured nail at the Queen of the Kingdom of the Sun.

"—you know as well as I do that if you present the bastard boy in any sort of sympathetic light, you'll lose a significant portion your grassroots appeal," Fredrica said. "Your popularity stems from your perceived compassion, Your Majesty. We have to create the impression that the boy intended to personally wrong you and your campaign, or your actions look an awful lot like cruelty."

Angelia was stunned silent.

"He was Theodore's bastard son. We can play off of that," Fredrica continued, magicking a quill to write as she dictated. "He was assisting Theodore in his escape. He was a planted spy. We could even highlight his downplay of his heritage, how he cut off his strand of hair... Hmmm, yes, that'll do wonders to establish a dishonest character."

"He was a kind boy," Angelia whispered despondently.

Fredrica paused the spinning of her web to flash the Queen a sympathetic smile.

"I know you have your regrets, Your Majesty," she said. "But the time for grieving is over."


	4. The Father

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The Academy will remain neutral."

"Tell me this is a ruse."

Angelia looks down at the disheveled man from her throne and found that she could not meet his eyes. 

"Tell me this is a ruse, Your Majesty," Charle Ceres said, robes seeming to drag the man's normally composed figure to the ground. "Perhaps I did not know my son as well as I'd thought, but I know his character. Elio would do no such thing, Your Majesty. Tell me you have simply hidden him. Tell me these are simply strategic lies."

Fredrica gave her a stern look from the wings of the audience chamber—the very full audience chamber.

"Headmaster Ceres, your adopted son was a traitor. There is no strategy to it," Angelia said. "Perhaps you may have known him as a different boy, but his character changed on the campaign. He betrayed my trust and attempted to sabotage the coming of this new era by allowing the escape of the false king Theodore Carlos. For these actions, he died."

Silence.

The room became frigid. When Angelia once again dared a glance at the man's eyes, they were hard and calculating.

"I am well aware of the escape of Theodore Carlos, Your Majesty."

The threat in that statement was enough to give Angelia pause.

"Tell me this is a ruse," he demanded once again.

This was no longer about the boy's death. This Angelia knew. This was a battle for her cousin's integrity.

One that she had no choice in.

"The boy was a traitor."

With that, Charle Ceres stood.

"You would do well to remember, Headmaster," Angelia said, "The conference we shall be having soon on the Academy's funding. The Kingdom has much reconstruction to carry out, and the security of that funding is tenuous."

"I will have none of these politics, Your Majesty. The Academy will remain neutral," Charle said. "I, however, will not."

The chamber doors slammed shut behind him with runic wind, and Angelia desperately wished to send somebody to flag him down, to pull him aside so that she could explain.

But by the end of the day, Charle Ceres had left the capital.


End file.
